That interest in return on investment opens the chamber up to critics who drubbed the 2014 light rail proposal as a suboptimal choice of projects. Its huge price tag and relatively low ridership projections – due in part to a route that bypassed some of the city’s densest neighborhoods – could have drastically cut into the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s operating budget, which could in turn have hurt the agency’s bus service, those critics argued.

“I don’t think I would characterize the 2014 bond proposal as a bad plan or a bad investment,” Cantú said in the chamber’s defense. “It might not have been the perfect plan. And I think a lot of people and groups in Austin are looking for perfection, and perfection is the enemy of good enough.”

He either doesn’t know the concept “worse than nothing” or knows it and doesn’t care. Ignorant or dishonest. You pick.

If the Chamber’s ‘new approach’ that identifies sprawl as bad does not include radical honesty about how bad the 2014 light rail plan was (instead extolling I-35 ‘improvements’ and more state highway ‘investment’), then they have learned nothing; we are all dumber for having listened to them. I award them no points; and may god have mercy on their souls.

I don’t post very much, as the state of urbanist and transit advocacy in Austin has depressed it out of me, but as a reminder, I’m still alive, if barely, and you can get a lot of updates on facebook in #atxfreedomurbanists or on twitter.

Two important facebook comments in a thread fighting against a member of the establishment I thought it worth copying here and cleaning up before I go. Blockquotes (italics in most themes) are my words; things in quotes are the guy I was responding to).

The first:

I have my honesty and my integrity, which are worth a lot. It means that in the future, when I say something, people don’t have to think “does he really mean that?”. Or “is he exaggerating for the benefit of somebody or something else and doesn’t really know what he’s talking about?”

And the second (most of it):

“At least you have ideological purity in snaky Facebook posts, that is even better than a seat at the table for sure.”

Playing along with the bad guys is what the Alliance for Public Transportation did. They got nothing out of it. I fought them. I won. I beat a bad project which would have made things worse. And the people who were dishonest and disingenuous in service of Proposition 1 have to live with that. People should take what they say in the future with many grains of salt, as they were willing to be dishonest in the service of power. I’m not.

Show me why it’s worth my while to change. Show me an example of somebody like me who played along and was able to change the power structure instead of getting subsumed by it (or just having nothing good happen). Then I might listen, if the example is good enough and compelling enough. Until then, you’re wasting your time and everyone else’s.

“but no one in a position of power or authority gives a rats ass about what you say, because of how you present your opinion and maintain your relationships. ”

is a personal attack, by the way, and it’s also dishonest. The people who say substantively the same things but in a nicer way also get nowhere. The people who modify their message enough to get heard in this political environment are modifying it to the point where it is no longer substantively *true*. IE, the A4PT may have gotten listened to, but they did by basically lying to the public and to themselves. What good did that do anybody?

And of course remember again that the A4PT got listened to by lying to the public and to themselves, and then LOST. Don’t forget. Never forget.

Hey you remember when the North decided to be way too nice to the South and the result was that generations of kids down here grew up being taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, here that slaves were better off for being slaves, drugs that Robert E Lee didn’t want slaves / chose to set them free / was a big ole softy? But that the truth was he inherited some from his father-in-law, neuropathist delayed setting them free, and ordered that their wounds from being whipped be bathed in brine?

Fast-forward to January and February 2016. Two of the last three days, posts like the one pictured below have shown up on pages of people I sort-of follow, who are semi-respected and big parts of the ecosystem locally. Anybody see any parallels? Hint: “The FTA wouldn’t fund rail on Guadalupe/Lamar1” is the equivalent to “IT WAS ABOUT STATES’ RIGHTS!!!!1”

The ‘winners’ once again let the losers write the history. And when that happens, we all lose.

The original facebook post tagged Roger Cauvin and gave him credit for doing a bunch of legwork to get public statements from the FTA that directly contradict the claims made in 2014 by many people associated with the project. Suffice to say, the claim about the Feds in the picture is as best dishonest, and at worst a bald-faced lie ↩

The insiders who messed up Proposition 1 still haven’t come to terms with what they did, so I’m not going to let it sit either. Here’s something not to forget; when certain political actors try to pretend there was some kind of consensus behind the choice that got spanked at the polls instead of the one that was never allowed to be studied:

Saturday while at my son’s chess tournament and writing this article, I also stumbled across an old exchange (pre-election) between some folks in AURA (obviously not myself as I just found this discussion a couple of days ago) and one of the people in the Prop 1 campaign. The Prop 1 person indicated they “don’t do facebook battles” and wanted to set up a face to face meeting (this same person offered once to do the same thing with me).

This happened to me other times too. During the Prop 1 issue, I got 5 or 6 offers to meet privately – usually on twitter – from people who would not communicate on the issue publically. I took one person up on it (mine said they didn’t do ‘twitter battles’) and had a lunch at Zocalo, in which no minds were changed. I also saw no serious public response; not even once; to the legitimate concerns raised by myself and other members of AURA. Basically, these folks want to be able to say their piece, and then never answer for it – and they think that if they can only get you one-on-one, they’ll be able to convince you to change your mind1. It’s a fundamentally insulting, and, quite frankly, dishonest worldview – akin to believing that they are the rational adults and you are just a willful child; and if they can isolate you from your peer group, you will bend to their will. Or, another common belief is that people on our side could not possibly believe what we were saying – so maybe face to face we could be convinced to see reason. Perhaps, the goal was to claim to persuadable folks in the middle that “we tried to meet with them and discuss their concerns but they said no”, as if it’s reasonable to expect that a guy with a suburban office job and young kids can get downtown every day of the week for individual meetings.

It’s not only the hangers-on that did this. I’ve seen the same thing from actual Capital Metro employees. And it has to stop. To me, if it’s not said in public where everybody can see, it doesn’t count. And if you lack the courage of your convictions enough to answer your critics, that says that you are not truly being honest. And no, John Langmore, a broadside a day before the election repeating the same talking points you used the whole time does not count.

As it turns out, a local executive tried desperately to fix things at the last minute by getting Leffingwell, Spelman, and a few others together with representatives from AURA and OurRail in which the willful children were asked, finally, by the mediator, what it would take to get them to vote for the plan. The changes offered by the ‘adults’ were meaningless, of course, because even immediately before getting pantsed at the polls, the bubble they put themselves in prevented them from believing that the pro-transit criticism of the plan was legitimate.

And by then it was far too late – the plan could not be changed in any meaningful way; the failure by the self-proclaimed adults to listen to and/or publically address those many legitimate arguments had doomed the proposition to a significant defeat at the polls (which is, granted, better for transit than if the bad plan had actually passed, but nowhere near as good as if the bad plan had been scuttled before being placed on the ballot).

Austin deserves better. Demand better.

I had a typo in here for a long time; thanks, actually, to JD Gins, for inadvertently pointing it out in March 2015 ↩

Right now, whenever Capital Metro is asked about what’s next on rail, they mention a few possibilities, but pointedly do not mention the one route for which the transit activists and experts in Austin have continuously expressed a preference..

Right now, we’re coming off a rail campaign in which Austin’s transit advocates and experts rallied around defeating a rail proposal brought to them by a corrupt, dishonest, temporary agency comprised of mostly Capital Metro and some of the City of Austin. Said temporary agency is now pivoting even further towards suburban transit. In that rail campaign, our local media ranged from merely OK to outright cheerleaders for the establishment they claim to oppose. It’s clear that whichever side you fell on, you at least agree that Austin sustained a significant black eye.

Right now, the city of Austin is continuing a Guadalupe corridor study in which the overwhelming expressed preference of the people at the forum and via survey was for transit priority (either light rail or bus lanes), yet ongoing communications from the city mention neither.

Is anybody happy about this?

It’s time for a change. In following posts I will be laying out the 2015 Honesty Agenda on transportation. Most of the items will apply to Capital Metro (big shock). A few will apply to the City of Austin. A few will apply to the media. And a few will apply to my fellow transit activists. They are all things that should happen, if you want to feel good about what you’re pushing to the public (I’m being optimistic in presuming that even the worst offenders actually don’t like what happened at the end of 2014).

Join me on a new way forward – be honest about transportation and we’ll win more battles, and what’s more, the battles we win will be ones that were for things worth fighting for.

This is the same argument, with data, presented over the last few months by Julio Gonzalez-Altamirano. Dave Sullivan has been pointed to him on multiple occasions, by many people, including yours truly; with no response. Example:

A contemperaneous po

Dave Sullivan, 10/13/2014:

Any questions?
Everybody except Mayor is here. I’ll write some thoughts on mayor next, vitamin but short of endorsement.

D1: DeWayne Lofton (served on UTC with me for a time if I remember correctly).

D3: Pio Renteria, order because Almanza is a disaster. Nothing to do with transit or land use; she’s just a disaster overall.

D4: Greg Casar. Interested in transportation and doesn’t have any dumb ideas. Pressley is an embarassment, as are those who endorsed her despite FLUORIDE.

D6: Jimmy Flanigan. Exactly the same as above except substitute Zimmerman for Pressley and SUE EVERYBODY for FLUORIDE.

D7: Pool. Yes, I know Jeb is an urbanist. Supposedly. But he’s also been aggressively an asshole on Proposition 1, and has been unrepentant in it. It’s just amazing to me that AURA falls all over themselves to endorse a guy who called them whiny foot-stomping babies. Why would you trust a guy who played along with the liars to do what he says he’s going to do later anyways?

Oh, and he hired a guy from the Prop 1 disaster to be his campaign manager. I almost want to move to District 7 just to vote in this one.

D8: Scruggs. I still think a Circle C environmentalist is an oxymoron, but it’s better than a Hays County type.

D10: Dealey, reluctantly. She’s an ANC tool but not as much as Tovo will be, but that’s still better than the candidate endorsed by Austin’s awful old sprawl-subsidizin’ CoC mayors like Cooke and Todd.

Mayor later – with some back and forth.
I’ve started this spreadsheet (read-only link; you can save and edit as you like) of mostly strong pro-rail boxes in 2000 (basically central Austin, hepatitis until I hit the part of town where it started to lose – so a few non-yes precincts are included for geographic completeness). I didn’t go as far south as some people would; I consider central Austin to stop at Oltorf and go no further north than approximately Koenig. I did include some of lower East Austin.

So far, bronchi it looks like in extreme central Austin alone, viagra order a 2000 margin in the 2014 boxes would have yielded around a 5600 swing in votes (2800 nos changing to yeses, essentially). This is not yet sufficient to change the balance of the 2014 election (margin was about 27,000), but it is clearly a major portion of the swing.

Some key notes:

I have excluded Mueller because nobody lived there in 2000, so we can’t assign a reasonable value for their margin. The “mostly Mueller” precinct went for by 64% (1580/2470) – if I was forced to guess how they would have voted on the 2000 plan, I’d say 70%+. I also excluded one precinct on Auditorium Shores where 1 guy voted.

The 2000 report only has ranges for precinct margins. You can change the assigned value for each range in your copy of the spreadsheet if you want. I chose 75% for the “over 70%” boxes, 65% for the “60-70%” boxes, etc.

The precincts do not line up exactly. A few shifted boundaries, some were combined, numbers changed, etc. I have noted which precincts in 2000 I considered the most relevant for 2014. Again, you can save the spreadsheet yourself and change this if you wish. If more than one 2000 precinct was used for comparison, I averaged their assigned values first.

Will pull some interesting nuggets out of here later today as I get to them. I’m sick as a dog and at my kid’s chess tournament all day today, and my battery in my phone, being used for access, is dying fast.